What should a digital marketing strategy look like?
Marketing without a strategy is like working from home without a routine. Without structure or a plan to keep you focused, you’re unlikely to get optimal results. Without a strategy, your online advertising can be unfocused and ineffective. You can waste thousands of dollars running digital campaigns that launched with no plan behind them.
A strong digital marketing strategy sets marketing goals and has a clear direction. It has well defined key messages and targets key audiences. It is structured and intentional, well thought out, and clear. Most importantly, your marketing goals should relate to your overall business goals.
Let’s dig deeper! We’ve put together some tips to help you refine or create a winning digital marketing strategy.
Set goals that you can quantify
Goals are the foundation of a strategy. Write down your targets and quantify them where possible. You may want to increase traffic to your website by 25% or get 100 more followers on Facebook. Whatever it is, try and put a number next to it.
The main objective, of course, is to generate revenue. But there’s a whole lot of things that need to happen before you can do that. You need a good product or service, a strong key message, suitable digital marketing platforms, and a defined target audience. You need to establish and build trust with your potential customers and get them to engage with your brand.
Create micro-goals like engagement and web traffic that ultimately contribute towards the main goal – a sale.
Select platforms (on and offline) that will help you reach your goals
Now that you have clearly defined goals, you can decide on the digital platforms that will help you achieve these goals. Here are some examples of measurable goals with the platforms you can use to reach them.
- Get web traffic: SEO, paid ads on Google or on social media (Facebook and Instagram).
- Get more engagement from your followers: Publish posts on social media.
- Build trust with potential customers: Get active on social media and share customer testimonials.
- Get more sales your website: Make some changes to your website’s design and layout.
Tip! Place a Facebook pixel on your website so you can retarget people who have visited your website with ads reminding them to come back and make a purchase.
Learn everything about your potential customers!
Buyers today want to feel connected to the ads they see. It’s not enough to only know the gender and age of your target audience.
The more you know about your customers, the more effective your marketing will be. So dig deep! Who exactly are you targeting? Are they young engaged couples? Maybe older retired couples? Knowing their age and gender is just scratching the surface…
Where are they located? What are their incomes? Their online behaviors and habits? From this, you can determine your audiences’ FFND – fears, frustrations, needs, and desires. This information is invaluable. It can be used to write persuasive and compelling ad copy that speaks directly to your target audience. By analyzing your audience more closely, you’ll build a stronger connection and have a higher chance of making sales.
